GrammarPlanet {Crew Review}

GrammarPlanet is a new website which focuses on teaching your student Grammar online. Developed by Erin Karl of Analytical Grammar, Inc and Jerry Bailey of Dynamic Literacy, LLC the program is designed to develop a better understanding of Grammar using the online program provided. The program is in development so there are still some quirks but overall it seems to be a great program to use!

I set Miss Emmalee up for this review and though we did have some challenges originally, in the end she’s enjoyed using it and will continue even after this review. As they work through the development of the program, I fully expect this to be a popular website for home educators. The program is completely online – no workbooks or papers to keep up with – and best of all it is FREE! You can purchase a paid subscription which is AD free for a small fee but really the free version with ADs is pretty great, too.

Your student can easily log-in with the username and password that you create for them. You can add several students if you wish and you can set up the program as a teacher so that you can keep up with the progress of the students you place into your group. You can set up several groups as well if you are using this for a co-op or other program, then place that student in the appropriate group.

In the student account, your student will work through each unit. There are prompts to follow. Each unit contains a video, and a worksheet about what you are learning. You will find a little orange book in the lower left hand corner that you can click on which will open a PDF file of the accompanying lesson sheet about the topic. This is printable and a great review item for your student as they work through lessons in the program.

Videos are fairly short – around 5 minutes or so. They are also interactive. At certain points in the video you will find a short quiz about what’s being covered. These are not documented in the parent/teacher lessons though, they are only to ensure the student is paying attention for review purpose. If the student answers wrong, the student is then encouraged to repeat that part of the lesson video but is not forced to do so.

After the video, the student can click to Start Practice which will take you through practice exercises for the program. Here your student will see sentences where they can choose different Parts of Speech as directed in the program. As they click they can choose the word that is correct for each Part of Speech. Once they are done making choices, they then click to see if they are correct and the program will show the right and wrong answers. At the end of this section they will be taken to a quiz where they will see if they can pass the unit to move on to the next unit in the program.

If the student does not pass, the program locks the unit and the student cannot move forward until a parent unlocks that portion of the program for the student or resets the unit for the student to repeat the lesson in the program – whatever the parent or teacher chooses to do.

There are 13 units to the program at this time. Each builds upon the last unit until your students covers all the lessons. The program is very thorough and pretty easy to follow.